On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Matthew Raymond wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
>> I feel I missed something somewhere. What is wrong with <datalist>?
>> It mixes the legacy markup and <option> elements
Right, why is that bad?
It's like how <map> mixes legacy markup and <a> elements.
> and in fact could even theoretically allow invalid legacy markup on WF2
> clients, since on such clients it ignores everything but <option>
> elements.
I don't understand what you mean by this.
> So I could do the following...
>> <datalist id="myList">
> <html>
> <body></body>
> <body></body>
> <head>
> <select>
> <option>Item 1</option>
> </select>
> <select>
> <option>Item 2</option>
> </select>
> <select>
> </select>
> <option>Item 3</option>
> <option>Item 4</option>
> <option>Item 5</option>
> </head>
> </html>
> </datalist>
This would be invalid, though.
I mean, you could always put any random tag in any random place, indeed a
large proportion of HTML authors seem to think this is perfectly normal.
There is nothing that I can see about <datalist> that introduces or
encourages this at all.
> ...And a WF2-compliant UA would treat the above the same as this:
>> <datalist id="myList">
> <option>Item 1</option>
> <option>Item 2</option>
> <option>Item 3</option>
> <option>Item 4</option>
> <option>Item 5</option>
> </datalist>
>> In other words, there is no separation of legacy code and list
> options. The same might be true with <select>, of course, but there it's
> not rendered because the markup isn't supposed to be there in the first
> place, not because it's defined as a way of handling legacy code.
What's the difference?
> Despite my distaste for how <datalist> handles legacy code, I must
> concede that it is the best solution presented on the mailing list, and
> I approve of its inclusion in the latest draft of Web Forms 2.0.
I agree it's not perfect, but yeah, I think it's the best one so far.
When the requirements are somewhat self-contradictory, it's hard to come
up with the ideal solution. :-)
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'